Sacred Heart: A Heart to Love All People

Catholic Near Eastern Welfare Association

The Catholic Near East Welfare Association (CNEWA) was founded by Pope Pius XI in 1926 to provide support for the Eastern Churches. The geographic area of service has expanded from its original focus on Greece and Eastern Europe to include the Middle East, North East Africa, and India as well.

CNEWA works with and through Eastern Churches to share the love of Christ as needs for assistance are identified and solutions implemented. Current efforts include support for refugees and Christian communities in the Middle East.

Laudato Si' - Care for the Earth is a Moral Imperative

Pope Francis' most recent encyclical, Laudato Si', has just been released. Praise be to You, Laudato Si': On Care for Our Common Home is more than a simple argument in favor of environmental causes. It is a new contribution to the stream of Catholic social teaching -- addressing economics, politics, human rights, poverty, issues related to the environment, and more. This document will be studied and discussed in great detail in the coming weeks and months. For now, we welcome it and look forward to the discussion.

Joseph Fanelli and The Sacred Heart

Artist Joseph Fanelli began painting at the age of eleven. In his career he has specialized in painting portraits and floral arrangements. His painting of The Sacred Heart of Jesus was done for the chapel in his mother's home. He says that he normally remembers every stroke of his paintings but this was not true of the Sacred Heart. He looks at and knows that he did it but doesn't remember it in detail and feels that it was inspired in the creative sense.

Vatican Releases a Video with Laudato Si'

Spirituality in Daily Living

Sr. Laurel O'Neal, Er. Dio. of Stillsong Hermitage speaks of the Sacred Heart using the image of earthen vessels - broken a, healed, and transfigured - through which the union of divine and human shine forth. She writes, "The human heart ... is a dialogical event where God speaks, calls, breathes, and sings us into existence, and where ... we respond to become the people we are and ... are called to be."

Ask Theologika: Why a Devotion to the Sacred Heart?

Dear Theologika,

Why is there this big devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus? Don’t people realize that Jesus loves them unconditionally?

Dear Unconditionally,

Unfortunately, many people don’t experience unconditional love when they are growing up. Sometimes they grow up with a notion of God as a stern, judgmental parent. They get caught up in the question of whether God is all loving or all just. They haven’t been taught that no one can be just without being loving.

Praying with Our Holy Father

General Intention: That immigrants and refugees may find welcome and respect in the countries to which they come.

Evangelization: That the personal encounter with Jesus may arouse in many young people the desire to offer their own lives in priesthood or consecrated life.

Living in Faith

The Feast of the Sacred Heart is celebrated 19 days after Pentecost each year. It is always on a Friday. Devotion to the Sacred Heart began to develop in the Middle Ages, but it was considered a private devotion, not a specific feast day.

Growing in Faith

In Catholic culture, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has become so widespread that the image has become an icon of Catholicism. Why is this image so central to the modern or post 1500s Catholic imagination?

Treat them Tenderly: Pope Francis

Pope Francis celebrated Mass for the the Third Worldwide Retreat for Priests on June 12, 2015, the Feast of the Sacred Heart. In his homily for the priests he spoke of God’s tenderness — a tenderness like that of a father or a mother teaching a child to walk. A tenderness that binds his people in freedom, attracting them “with bonds of love, with ties of love.”

The Sacred Heart of Jesus: Source of LImitless Love

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus originated as a meditation on the love that Jesus has for humanity. In the 1500s, Jesuits and Franciscans promoted devotion to the wounded heart of Jesus. However, they did not stress the physical bleeding heart of Jesus crowned with thorns that has come down to us.

Just for fun

Try your hand at this puzzle.

Looking Ahead: The Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola

Take Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, understanding, my entire will and all that I possess. You have given all to me. To You, O Lord, I return it. All is yours; dispose of it wholly according to your will. Give me only your love and your grace, for this is enough for me.

Our Mission

To promote awareness
of the active presence of God
in everyday life.

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I must not be the dry, bloodless reproduction of a model, however perfect. God desires us to follow the examples of the saints by absorbing the vital sap of their virtues and turning it into our own life-blood, adapting it to our own individual capacities and particular circumstances.

Angelo Roncalli, Pope St. John XXXIIIJournal of a Soul, 1903

"I won't take no for an answer," God began to say to me when He opened His arms each night wanting us to dance.

St. Catherine of Siena

Our call to service is not a call to submissiveness. It is a call to thunderous faith, born of deep passion that compels us to offer our entire selves for the sake of the world.

Nick Wagner,Give Us This Day, July 2012

Everything is grace, everything is the direct effect of our Father's love. Everything is grace because -- everything is God's gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events -- to the heart that loves, all is well.

Thérèse of Lisieux

You say grace before meals? All right, but, I say grace before the play and the opera and grace before the concert and the pantomime, and grace before I open a book and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing, and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

G. K. Chesterton

The Catholic writer . . . will feel life from the standpoint of the central Christian mystery: that it has, for all its horror, been found by God to be worth dying for.

Flannery O'Connor

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